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The 1915–17 Armenian deportations and massacres generally referred to as the Armenian Genocide constitute the collective violence committed against the Armenians during this stage. This chapter analyzes the Young Turk denial of the act of collective violence as the Young Turk government argued that the violence was not intentional but rather an unintended consequence of the strategic deportation of Armenians from one location to another during World War I. Such denial of the act, the chapter argues, emerges through the interaction of the Young Turk structure of similarity and Young Turk modernity, on the one hand, and of polarizing Young Turk sentiments with the 1912–13 Balkan Wars, on the other. Selective silences and selective subversions form the twin strategies of Young Turk denial.

This chapter explores reforms to marital violence policy and legislation from 1970 to 1996. During this period, feminist activists brought pressure to bear upon the government, who for the first time acknowledged the problem of marital violence and took action against it. From the 1970s onwards, the Oireachtas passed a number of legislative reforms, for which feminist groups had campaigned, that offered protection to victims of marital violence. By 1996, an abused wife could have her abuser barred from the family home, acquire a protection order or safety order to deter further abuse, charge a sexually abusive spouse with marital rape, and permanently sever her bond with her abuser through divorce. Additionally, the Gardaí gained increased powers of arrest in domestic violence cases, and State agencies developed a more nuanced and effective public policy approach to the issue of violence within the home.

The definition of child trafficking and Palermo Protocol are set forth, together with the Optional Protocol to the CRC on child trafficking. Causes for child trafficking are examined including poverty, globalization, cultural traditions and gender roles. Different forms of child trafficking include trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation, domestic labor, agricultural work, begging and factory work. Services for children who have been trafficked are discussed together with efforts to stop child trafficking in both sending and receiving nations. Policy efforts are analyzed, including the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act in the United States and Sweden’s outlawing of the buying, but not selling of sexual services.

This introductory chapter details the research methods undertaken for this book's study, emphasizing that immigrant women's vulnerability is based not only on their gender but also on nationality, race, ethnicity, language, religion, documented or undocumented immigration status, threatened legal status, situational isolation from family and community, cross-national frames of cultural and legal reference, and socioeconomic status. This activist research is developed in that vein at a nonprofit organization in Texas, in order to learn about the experiences of Latina battered immigrants in their quest for U.S. citizenship through the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA). Advocates, activists, and scholars alike have considered these laws as successful achievements for women's and immigrants' rights movements.

Every year, approximately 750,000 adults are released from prison; prisoner reentry involves returning to the community and reintegrating successfully, but many former prisoners return to impoverished and disorganized urban neighborhoods, and face a number of challenges. The difficulties are compounded by advances in technology, integrated database management systems, and politicians passing laws outside of the criminal justice system that deny felons access to housing, jobs, education, and social welfare programs; thus, an increased number of adults are captured in an ever growing set of net-widening laws. Drawing from participant-observations and in-depth interviews, this chapter explores what it means to be a convicted felon and how the word felon becomes a permanent fixture of a person’s identity. Participants’ narratives demonstrate that the denial of rights through the use of automated criminal background checks, established by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 (Brady Act), and administrative roboprocesses reinforce racial and economic stratification. The net-widening effects are tough on criminals, but such laws simultaneously make it difficult for anyone convicted of a felony to lead a crime free life after completing their entire criminal sentence. Consequently, a convicted felon is unable to become a non-felon and reintegrate successfully.

This chapter examines the conceptual terms through which human rights is framed in order to tease out the epistemological and ontological premises that prescribe human rights mechanisms such as the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted in the post-World War II moment, is often cited as the cornerstone and origin of contemporary human rights. Rather than situate temporal origins, this chapter considers the epistemological origins of the contemporary concept of human rights in order to situate strategies like translation that are touted as a means to discover truly universal principles. In particular, it looks at the debates around translation and cultural relativism that continue to shape human rights debates, along with the role of the law in naturalizing certain assumptions about human rights. These debates indicate how the idea of human rights is framed primarily through the notion of representation—of representing humanity and representing fairly different cultural definitions of universal principles. Finally, the chapter explores the paradox of universalism, strategies of translation, and the politics of representation in relation to human rights.